This weekend I saw Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, which the director considered one of his two greatest films. I even put together a little trailer for it:
Persona is good fun. It’s bold, ethereal, shocking, and playful. It’s a film about how we respond to our humanness – our longing for others, our pain, our love, and our anger – and at times it’s a film about its own making. Persona references itself as an example of the sort of human expression it catalogs. And somehow all this arises from an engaging story of two women whose closeness opens them up to communicate their deepest fears and desires.
There are moments of intense visual beauty, of slow, gently choreographed movement. There are also moments when Bergman seems to literally allow the film to fall apart, using disintegrating and non-diegetic images to illuminate the inner turmoil of its characters. It’s like a poem that alternates between rhyming meter and free verse. It’s devious and wonderful.
